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The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) is is hosting a retrospective of work by underground cartoonist and graphic novelist Kim Deitch. The exhibit opened Friday and runs through December 5th, 2008. A few years ago I had the privilege of spending an afternoon with Kim Deitch in his uptown studio. I never got to use the audio as the piece got killed. But Deitch has always been one of my favorite artists so I never got rid of the audio, I knew I would use it someday, in fact I have had a longstanding challenge with Boing Boing’s Mark Frauenfelder over this audio (he has tape sitting on his shelf from an interview with Kim’s father Gene Deitch).

On thing that fascinates me about Deitch is that his story completely intertwines with the story of alternative comics. He was on the scene drawing for the East Village Other in 1969 when underground comix became a national phenomenon, he was also there when Art Spiegelman was putting Raw on magazine racks, and he is also part of the current renaissance, Pantheon has published both his Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and Alias the Kat. In the first clip Kim Deitch reflects on his relationship with the ever evolving genre of alternative comics. In the second clip he talks about what has always remained a constant.